Cara Mills Machine: Part A, Part B, Part C & so on…

About

The exhibition will encompass various elements from Mills’ artistic practice including installation, painting, and an interactive ‘painting machine’.

With an interest in curation Mills often responds to site-specific conditions, imagining the type of work she could create for an individual space. “Floor plans serve as a catalyst for my production, they work as a two-dimensional frame-work for what I can see happening inside a space”.

Typically, each piece is made in relation to or developed from a previous project. Mills intends for her works to have conversations, dialogues and relationships with one another as well as the viewer. Her works are designed to be experienced as part of an ongoing creative and discursive continuum. They are to be seen as parts; part a, part b, part c and so on. Yet these parts are connected conceptually and have interplay. “Each of my works has a different pace or rhythm which is to do with how much attention I’d like the audience to give to each piece. The works seem to have personalities.”

The exhibition “Machine: Part A, Part B, Part C & so on…” has provided Mills with the opportunity to continue to make work that is interactive and open, by continuing to unpick what it means today to make a painting or to create an installation. “I’m interested by the tags placed on my work: installation, kinetic installation, sculpture, performance piece etc.” She does not try to define or limit a work by these definitions but instead leaves these open for the audience to form their own perception.

Mills sits on the side of having a critical approach to art making, whilst still making art. What does it mean to actually create something physical? What does it mean to make a painting? What do we expect from these objects as an audience? Her work addresses these questions through humour and design: refiguring or interpreting machinery to prove a point. She continues to blur boundaries in her new work for the show. Allowing the audience to find their own interpretations of these questions, playing on their values and expectations of a work.